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Police/Public Interaction: Arrests, Use of Force by Police, and Resulting Injuries to Subjects and Officers- A Description of Risk in One Major Canadian City
| Articles are $4.00 and only available by downloadable Acrobat PDF. |
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| Page |
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139 |
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Total Pages 17 |
| Author(s) |
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Chris Butler
Christine Hall
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November 2008 |
Categories
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Survey
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| Abstract |
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The controversy surrounding the temporal association of subject death in custody with the use of the Conducted Energy Weapon (CEW) by law enforcement officers has identified the critical need for research to document the operational risk profile of use of force modalities,including the CEW. While several police agencies and independent research bodies in the United States have released information that suggests that the appropriate use of the CEW reduces officer and subject injuries, there is no epidemiological research that either supports or refutes this conclusion within the Canadian policing experience. Extensive media coverage of events where subjects who have died proximal to the use of the CEW by police has heightened concerns about the safety of CEW use. This is augmented by the lack of publication of CEW uses without an adverse outcome and the absence of similarly intense media coverage of persons who die in police custody without the use of the CEW. Thus, publication bias prevents the public and stakeholder community from forming an informed opinion about the actual risk presented by the conducted energy weapon or other use of force modalities. Similar biased reporting of events has also led the lay-public to have the impression that the police use of force is frequent when compared to the overall number of police and public interactions. Studies in the United States (Department of Justice; National Survey of Contacts between Police and the Public, 2000) have found that the relative frequency of police use of force (force applied or threatened) when compared with the number of police/public interactions occurs only 1.5% of the time. The actual frequency of events where officers actually applied force versus threatened the use of force is not known. Other studies in the United States investigating the injury potential of use of force methods (non firearm) have consistently found that the highest citizen and officer injuries occur when physical control (hands-on) tactics are used (Alpert and Dunham 2004, Smith and Petrocelli 2001). The use of conducted energy weapons and OC spray has been found to result in lower citizen and officer injury rates (Bozeman 2007, Smith 2007, Seattle Police Department). This study is the first in Canada to document the frequency of use of force by police compared to all police-public interactions, force by police compared to citizen arrest, and injury outcome to both citizens and police by force modality. |
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| Articles are $4.00 and only available by downloadable Acrobat PDF. |
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